This text prepares students to navigate their dance programs and prepare for a various careers. It orients students to dance as an academic discipline, broadens their understanding of dance, establishes solid approaches to studying dance, and connects dance on campus to their previous training.

Studying Dance: A Guide for Campus and Beyond is a comprehensive bridge for students transitioning into the first year of a college dance program. Through this text, students will understand dance in new and exciting ways, embrace it as an academic discipline, navigate and take charge of their dance education, and visualize potential careers after graduation.

Studying Dance: A Guide for Campus and Beyond opens students’ eyes to all the artistic, cultural, and educational aspects of dance. By expanding their thinking, students will move to a deeper understanding of themselves as dancers and the world around them.

To purchase Studying Dance: A Guide to Campus and Beyond, visit the Human Kinetics website.

Take yourself back to the late eighties, 1987 to be specific, where you will meet Miss Karen. Miss Karen is the persona that I embody as I describe my experiences of growing up (literally) in a competition dance studio in the 1980s and 1990s. Old competition dances from the late 80s and early 90s are recreated, revised, and revisited to take viewers on a “totally radical” journey through my childhood and early adulthood, while revealing the positive and not-so positive aspects of participating in this cultural phenomenon.

Karen received a United States Artist Project grant to fund the first phase of this project. Stay tuned for Phase II in 2015.

Karen’s newest solo is a choreographic self-portrait that reveals the many layers of the fleeting nature of performance and a lifetime of identifying oneself through dance. The work includes four mini-solos, each 2 to 3 minutes in length, that address what it feels like to be in the spotlight, the sensation of doing what you love, the memories others have of you, and celebrating the present.